Judges scupper Home Office clampdown on 'sham marriages'

Immigrants will again be free to use "sham marriages" as a passport to Britain after a crushing human rights court defeat for the Government.

Appeal Court judges have ruled against a Home Office crackdown on couples who arrange bogus ceremonies to gain rights to live in the UK.

Mr Justice Buxton said asking migrants to prove their relationship was genuine breached their human right to marry and not to be discriminated against.

He upheld a ruling that exempting Church of England weddings from the rules was unfair – even though vicars carry out their own rigorous checks that a relationship is genuine.

And the court ruled it was unfair to treat all weddings involving migrants with only limited permission to remain in the UK as suspicious.

Action could be justified only if there was evidence that the union might be bogus.

This destroys the policy, which reduced the number of suspected sham weddings each year from 3,700 to fewer than 300.

Home Office Minister Liam Byrne said he was "disappointed" with the verdict and might try to appeal to the House of Lords.

The crackdown, introduced in February 2005, was targeted at those who marry Britons, or EU citizens with full residency rights, in order to gain permission to live here indefinitely.

It forced migrants to seek a special certificate to marry if they lived outside the EU, or had only limited rights to live in the UK.

Those with only a few months' leave to remain left were routinely refused on the grounds that the ceremony was intended only to avoid removal from the country.

Even those given permission to wed were forced to marry at a designated register office, with union.

The only exception was for Church of England ceremonies.

The Home Office argued that the Church has a proud history of carrying out its own checks on whether a relationship is genuine.

Last year, Ministers suffered a High Court defeat at the hands of an illegal Algerian immigrant and a Polish woman allowed into Britain following the controversial expansion of the EU.

Mahmoud Baiai, a Muslim from Algeria, and Izabela Trzcinska, a Polish Roman Catholic, decided to marry in February 2005, five months after moving in together.

Since Miss Trzcinska, an EU national, was here legally, the ceremony would have changed her fiance's status, allowing him to remain in Britain indefinitely.

The Home Office blocked the ceremony, but judges said they had suffered discrimination.

The finding arose from the fact that, as the regulations did not apply to C of E marriages, it operated to the unfair disadvantage of not only non-Anglican Christians but also members of other faiths, including Muslims and Hindus.

Home Secretary John Reid appealed, but yesterday the court upheld the original verdict.

The Government was forced to act after a massive surge in suspected bogus ceremonies, often arranged by criminal gangs who could earn £10,000 for each wedding.

Citizens with a right to stay in Britain often from other EU countries were paid up to £2,000 a time to take part in the sham weddings.

Often, they did not even know their partner's full name or a Polish woman allowed into Britain following the controversial expansion of the EU.